The looking outwards post I want to look at for this post is Angela Lee’s post from week 6. This post deals with the artist Matt Deslauriers. The piece of work she specifically analyzes is a generative art piece that creates random colors and lines that generate based on the click of the mouse. I agree with Angela’s analysis of the importance of color in the artist’s piece. The artist used color palettes that pre-exist and are already established as well liked. This move is particularly smart as it is something that will appeal to the masses which is important in the pieces that he is creating. Angela also notes this in her own post. She also touches upon the importance of finding a balance in his piece which can be hard with the randomness of it, but she addresses this situation well as well.
Image of the piece that is created when you click the canvas.
Danny Cho’s Looking Outward 03 looked at Neri Oxman’s ‘Wanderers’. The 2014 project creates very high-quality renderings of computer-generated growth of organic forms. I’m drawn to it because of the unsettling appearance of these forms, which appear infectious and bacterial. I agree with Danny’s assumption that trigonometry is used. More specifically, I understand that realistic video games use extremely high polygon counts and textures, which might explain the high definition of this project. I’m interested in Danny’s suggestion that Cinema 4D was used in this project. If so, it might’ve been a separate plugin that was developed by the artist to manipulate objects in the Cinema 4D software. I relate to Danny’s concern of computational generation not usually appearing very organic, because of the ‘uncanny valley’ of computed organic objects is very unsettling to me. I’m not sure if I’ll ever be okay with computers o
For this Looking Outwards post, I was intrigued by one of Kristine Kim’s Looking Outwards post where she looked into the artist, Refik Anadol. Something that really pulls me towards Anadol’s whole portfolio is his ability to create visuals that are able to take the viewers to an alternate universe. Kristine also articulates his ability to play around with the functionalities of that of architectural characteristics which makes sense when his pieces often take the space into account when being presented.
There is one particular piece which Kristine included in her response which was Melting Memories by Anadol which held a concept of materializing memory. It was interesting to see something so fragile and non-tactile like memory was manifested into a visual and perceptive form. With methods like this, Anadol is able to create a new world with digital processed as Kristine also mentions in her response. Anadol’s body of work consists of these ideas of materializing areas/things in the world where one would not really be able to visual or imagine in physical form and he wants to create a path towards a future that connects the digital world with the one that surrounds us already.
For this week, I looked at Jenny Lee’s Looking Outward-07 article focused on Refik Anadol and his project Melting Memories. Refik is a computational media artist who blurs the lines between computation and installation-based digital art.
Like Jenni, I am also completely fascinated by Refik’s algorithmic methods and uses of brain data. It’s always really incredible to see the thought process behind certain projects and this was one of them. I was also in love with the way Refik decided to actually render the information in visual graphics. The forms are so elegant and natural, but so clearly computational.
Below are screenshots of data used in the project. Seeing the backend of Refik’s practices is really inspiring to analyze.
For this assignment, I looked at Xu Xu’s looking outward 05: 3D computer graphics. She looked at the work of Alexey Kashpersky, who is a 3D digital artist. Kashpersky’s work mostly focused on CG art and 3D modeling and printing.
For this particular project, by modeling a series of virus, he attempted to raise people’s awareness through his artwork. He created a beautiful model of Hepatitis C to remind people the deadliness of virus despite their visually pleasing appearance. Through his artwork, he tried to make people be aware of the danger of HCV infection and bloodborne pathogens.
In Xu’s looking outward, she stated how she really appritiate the cleaness of Kashpersky’s model and how she thinks the VR technology really helps to create a sense of realism. I agree with her that the artist is admirable in putting a lot of effort into makeing the model perfect. The result product definitly captures people’s attentation. But I also think the artist’s intention of wanting to help people with his artwork is admirable and how he actually achieved his goal of creating awareness through his work.
This is a randomness project that Jina explored on her LO. When I first took a look at this project on the artist’s website, I was surprised to see that it was animated because I didn’t imagine “scrolling endlessly” in such a dynamically animated way. Like Jina said, it is very interesting that the color and pattern is randomized, but the overarching system is very systematic. I was personally fascinated by the choice of spot color and gradient in this specific work. The gradient is not used simply in a decorative way, but it adds an interesting depth across the work, and the red becomes an important spot color that highlights the form and flow of a single braid. To add on to the post, the braid group consists of braid diagrams that have n strings that are attached to n points at the top and bottom of the diagram. Each braid is attached at the string ends to another braid to form a longer braid, then the whole braid is shrunk down vertically in half for an appropriate scale.
I decided to write about the project cited in Katrina Hu’s Looking Outwards-04, called the Weather Thingy. Created by Adrien Kaeser, the Weather Thingy is a real-time climate sound controller that essentially converts climactic data into instrument-friendly midi data. One aspect that I found particularly interesting was that the creator put a special focus on being able to listen to the real-time impact of the weather on a piece. I think this project captures a little piece of a moment in a very unique way, and I thought it was interesting how it was similar in concept (and presumably execution) to Pierry Jacquillard’s Prélude in ACGT, which I wrote about in one of my previous blog posts. It just goes to show that the modern conception of art is very different from the traditional paint-on-canvas ideas– the versatility of code even allows us to create art out of seemingly mundane data.
Siwei Xie’s Looking Outwards 06 assignment is about Richter, a German visual artist, who created “4900 Colours: Version II” (2008). The colors used in this series are generated randomly from a palette of 25 colors by a computer program. Xie said: “Creator’s artistic sensibility manifests by how ‘non-random’ the panels look, with some dominated by particular colors which are often placed next to each other. But the whole point of ‘pure’ randomness is that apparent patterns are expected to occur.”
Two panels from the exhibit
To add on, this reminded me of an interesting thing I learned about how the ‘random’ shuffle function for music is not actually random. When they are actually purely random, people will feel like they can detect patterns in even the smallest coincidences — such as when certain songs or artists come after one another.
To deal with this ‘nonrandom’-feeling randomness, Spotify changed its algorithms to feel more random to humans. Instead of using the Fisher-Yates shuffle, which people complained wasn’t genuinely random, Spotify updated its algorithm to distribute artists and genres more evenly. For example, “if there are four songs by the White Stripes in a playlist … the algorithm will aim to play them at roughly 25% intervals.” I think it’s very interesting how much the human tendency to detect patterns can affect the way we interpret randomness.
It is important to appreciate the beautiful sound of nature. Meanwhile, it is intriguing to manipulate such sounds through scientific methods. Browsing through my friends’ posts, I find my friend Mike Jin’s post 04 about the Chijikinkutsu really interesting.
Chijikinkutsu represents the art of arranging a series of equipments that take advantage of magnatism to collide and drift to make sounds. Originating from the traditional sound ornamentations for Japanese gardens, this sound equipment uses floating needles in the glasses of water which can be magnetized through electricity. Driven by the magnetic force, the needles will hit the glasses and make delicate sounds. By controling the spatial arrangement of such glass tumblers and the electric current size of each coil attached to the them, people will be able to enjoy the different pitches and magnitudes of the sounds by the needles. A beautiful, yet to some extent intentionless composition of sounds are generated. Like my friend Mike mentioned, such an arrangement is not only a sound art but also a beautiful visual appreciation decorated by the plain, glass tumblers arranging from the near to far on the ground. Meanwhile, Mike mentioned it would be more interesting to carry out such sound equipment around the globe because of the variance across the magnetic field in different countries. However, I have some doubts about that because the magnetic fields are actually initiated temporarily by the small coils attached on the glass tumblers. Maybe it won’t have to have too much relationship with the real geomagnetic field. On the other hand, it would be definitely fun to utilize different materials other than the glass and needles around the globe to make such sound art, and that would be fantastic for different cultures to communicate and create diverse range of sound art compositions.
As an inspirational project that my peers have assessed, I chose Karl Sims Flow. I completely agree with Sarah Choi’s assessment that the piece is most notable for its use of nature’s existing motion such as gravity and flow of water. However, one important aspect to note is some of the other motions inspired by works of other painters such as Van Gogh. Through using Gogh’s classic bush stroke, Sims recreates the Starry Night in a modern fashion
Flow inspired by Van Gogh’s Starry Night
One other notable thing is that although the motion itself captures nature, the color orientation of the rippling effects are quite uncommon. Just as Sarah said, the co-existing randomness and configured motion is interesting. I also think the co-existence of the natural motion and artificial colors are also notable. This piece represents the variables of nature and randomness governed by the movement of human beings. That concept lying behind the implementation of the art is that different factors of the peice is all being controlled by the audience to create a truly mesmerizing motion depicted with natural motion and artificial colors.
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